Re: POTUS 45.33: ""We're rounding them up in a very humane way, in a very nice way."

During the last decade, antipathy for millennials and their views has been something of a hallmark of the conservative movement. Poll after poll shows young people abandoning the right, and the feeling is evidently mutual. Despite losing young voters by a two-to-one margin in the 2008 election, Republicans largely shrugged their shoulders and decided the problem wasn’t the GOP, it was those darn kids.

Baby boomers look at the generation they raised, growing up in the world they created, and scratch their heads in confusion and horror. In focus groups I conduct, I often hear older voters on the right describe millennials as a hostile force trying to take their country away from them. Older Americans are more likely than younger Americans to say they agree with the statement, “These days, I feel like a stranger in my own country,” and doubtless part of the reason Donald Trump performed so well with older voters was his success tapping into this sentiment.

Conservatives aren’t wrong to be worried about what a millennial-run America would look like, given just how thoroughly today’s young adults disagree with them on matters of politics and policy. Only 2 percent of millennials consider themselves “consistently conservative,” for example, while a quarter consider themselves “consistently liberal.” As for political party affiliation, young people aren’t enamored of either party, but they have a stronger affiliation with the Democratic party. That gap has not narrowed as voters age; in fact, it has widened to give a whopping 33-point advantage to Democrats among millennials. Young people are not discovering conservatism on their own and they are largely repelled by what they see coming from the right in the Trump era.

Conventional wisdom incorrectly suggests that young people always hold progressive views and older people hold more evolved conservative views that have been duly informed by experience in the “real world.” The kids, this reasoning goes, will eventually realize the error of their ways.

The data tell a different story. Ronald Reagan was able to win an enormous share of the youth vote for his reelection campaign in the 1980s, and as recently as the election between George W. Bush and John Kerry, young voters were still somewhat narrowly divided between the two political parties. It is only in the last decade that a new and dramatic right-left, old-young divide has emerged. Today, not only are young people increasingly identifying as liberals even as they age, and eschewing conservatism as a movement, but their views on many hot-button issues are now predictive of where older generations will stand on those issues in a decade. On some issues, such as guns and abortion, for example, Pew Research reports very little change over time in generations’ views. Where the generation gaps are largest, however, there has been substantial movement over time, and always in the direction of older generations “catching up” with the views of their younger counterparts rather than the other way around.

Last edited by bronconick; 05-11-2018 at 07:47 AM.

"I went over the facts in my head, and admired how much uglier the situation had just become. Over the years I've learned that ignorance is more than just bliss. It's freaking orgasmic ecstasy".- Harry Dresden, Blood Rites

Re: POTUS 45.33: ""We're rounding them up in a very humane way, in a very nice way."

The WH hosted military spouses today. Our armed forces are 40% non-white. The odds that -- BY CHANCE -- a group of 52 military spouses would contain no people of color are lower than 100 trillion to 1. So, umm.... pic.twitter.com/zi6XzmzYBd

Re: POTUS 45.33: ""We're rounding them up in a very humane way, in a very nice way."

WASHINGTON ó Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, told colleagues she was close to resigning after President Trump berated her on Wednesday in front of the entire cabinet for what he said was her failure to adequately secure the nationís borders, according to several current and former officials familiar with the episode.

One persistent issue has been Mr. Trumpís belief that Ms. Nielsen and other officials in the department were resisting his direction that parents be separated from their children when families cross illegally into the United States, several officials said. The president and his aides in the White House had been pushing a family separation policy for weeks as a way of deterring families from trying to cross the border illegally.

ďWe donít have laws. We have laws that were written by people that truly could not love our country,Ē the president told members of the National Rifle Association last week in Dallas during lengthy remarks about immigration.

Mr. Trumpís anger about immigration has grown in recent weeks, according to several officials. He repeatedly claimed credit for the fact that during his first year in office, illegal border crossings dropped to their lowest levels in decades. But this year, they have risen again, robbing him of one of his favorite talking points.